


The Architect and King Hyle’s Wife

by Miss_M



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, CARTER Angela - Works
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, F/M, Kissing, Revisionist Fairy Tale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-25
Updated: 2013-08-25
Packaged: 2017-12-24 15:19:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,879
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/941482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jaime Lannister, Brienne of Tarth and Hyle Hunt enact Angela Carter’s “The Kiss.” Hyle is a usurping soldier-king, Brienne is his awkward, dutiful wife, and Jaime is a cocky, exotic architect. Temples are built, wits are tested, and kisses are bestowed – all in the best folktale/fairytale tradition.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Architect and King Hyle’s Wife

**Author's Note:**

> Fusion between ASOIAF/GoT and Angela Carter’s short story “The Kiss”
> 
> If you don’t know this story, I suggest you [read it](http://dreamersanthology.blogspot.com/2007/10/kiss-by-angela-carter.html) before you read this fic, it’s super short and super awesome. In fact, if you don’t know Carter’s work, you should seriously go and read all of it right now. Starting with “The Kiss,” a piece of fiction which haunts my dreams and puts my own writing to shame. It recently inspired me to think how my favorite ASOIAF/GoT couple would fit into the dreamlike tale Carter spins, and what I might make of Carter’s (and GRRM’s) themes of female agency and how stories are made. Carter and GRRM and the makers of GoT own everything and I own nothing (except the blame if this fic sucks). 
> 
> This is the first piece of fiction I’ve written in years. Years, I tell you! Such is the power of J/B. They made me think about them and think about them, and finally I just had to dust off my creaky writing skills and churn this out. (J/B are not to blame for this fic either, though.) After lurking on the edges of this fandom, I decided to take the plunge and post my own little brainchild, misbegotten though it may be. If you choose to read on, you will be shot out of canon and into frilly bonkers land. Have a safe and pleasant journey!

King Hyle’s wife was not beautiful or graceful or particularly demure, but the king did not mind because she was _his_. 

Ownership. Control. Power. He had grasped the connection between the three years earlier, when he took a chance on seizing the throne. The risk had been proportionate to the reward, but his predecessor had been an incompetent, his advisors shrewd enough to crown the upstart knight before the realm descended into war. That left him free to focus on seizing neighboring lands, including his wife’s native island. Once Hyle – _King_ Hyle – owned her island, he owned her. _That_ mattered far more to him than looks and grace, which he could find in concubines. When in his cups he could sometimes be heard bragging that bedding his wife was not unlike scaling a mountaintop, and what man did not enjoy a good challenge?

Once upon a time the customs of the land required married women to cover their faces and bodies in black veils, to prevent strangers from plundering pleasure from the sight of other men’s wives’ faces. Common opinion had it that this fashion would have been a mercy to King Hyle’s wife. She looked startling in her gowns of shimmering silk, but then she would have looked equally startling in britches or sackcloth. A scarecrow among the twittering, dancing, cruel little birds which populated the court. She was so quiet it was difficult to see how clever she might be. Her scowl could send pages scurrying, set her lithe, pretty ladies tittering behind bejeweled hands. She had a name, but no one ever called her that. She was always ‘Your Grace’ or ‘My Lady’ or ‘King Hyle’s wife.’ Sometimes she almost forgot she had an actual name, a name her father used to call her when she was a girl, before her island was taken along with all other possible endings to her story.

She was childless. The king often reproached her for this. Her one duty and obligation, unfulfilled. 

Mostly King Hyle was away on one of his wars. She suspected he liked war not for the territories and booty and glory it brought him, but because war was an elusive mistress. There was always another conquest, another ruler waiting to be vanquished. He could never possess them all. 

It was during one of his long absences that she hit upon the idea of building a temple in his honor, a paltry offering in place of the child she had failed to give him. She commissioned a foreigner to design the building, an architect newly arrived in the city, famous for his skill with the golden rule and the golden hand he wore to replace the one he’d lost in his youth to a duel, a war injury, a disease or a tavern brawl. There were many versions of that particular story, and the architect tolerated them all, encouraged them even. 

He looked King Hyle’s wife full in the face without starting at her looks or pretending not to notice them, looked her up and down in a way no one ever had even before she became queen and therefore supposedly above being thus assessed. His direct gaze, the way he smiled and promised to decorate the temple with tiles the exact blue of her eyes, then flirted with her ladies before swaggering away, back to his drawings and plans, made her wish for black veils to cover herself. She wanted to hide from the architect’s scrutiny and to make him look only at her eyes. Flowery poems had been written about her eyes, pregnant with the court poets’ relief at finding the queen’s one good feature, which they could praise sincerely. She wished for words to wipe the smile off the architect’s handsome face. Though he had a silver tongue to go with his golden hand, there had been no hint of either mockery or flattery in his promise, and his gaze had been very frank. 

Work on the temple was almost finished when news reached the capital that King Hyle was returning victorious from his latest campaign. His wife sent for the architect and told him he must finish the last arch of the temple in time for her husband’s triumphal arrival. The architect replied with a grin that it was impossible, but he might just manage it – if the queen would give him a kiss. 

King Hyle’s wife was not beautiful or skilled in courtly ways, and she did not consider herself clever. She knew she could have the architect thrown in a dungeon or even executed for such an insult. From the way he smiled at her, she guessed that he did not care if she did, and that certainty sent a flush of anger through her. For all her faults, she tried to be a dutiful wife, and knew herself to be an honorable woman. Her kisses were not grain to be cast to every passing blackbird.

She bade the architect return the following day. When he did, she presented him with a tray of hard-boiled eggs, each stained a different color. He picked a blue egg, sketching an amused half-bow as he held it in his golden hand and peeled it. She asked what it tasted like, and he said it tasted like an egg.

She had him try a different-colored egg. He tried a red one, then a green one. Each one tasted just like the other eggs, he said. 

The queen then gestured at her ladies hovering just of out earshot, casting covetous looks at the architect and pretending not to be listening hard for any stray word they might catch, for all the world like a flock of brightly colored birds. She told the architect to kiss any one of them he liked, for all women tasted the same. Or so her husband had claimed on their wedding night, though she did not impart _that_ to the architect. 

He eyed her shrewdly, asked if he might return the following day with a test of his own. The queen saw no reason not to give him an equal chance. 

He came back with a spring in his step, bearing three bowls on a tray, his golden hand gleaming as brightly as his self-assured smile. 

Amused at the symmetry between their thinking, the queen tasted the colorless liquid in a bowl she chose at random, and found it to be water. At the architect’s urging she then tried a second bowl, and found it to be full of water too, but when she took a healthy sip from the third bowl, her face flushed dark red, her blue eyes swam, and she coughed and spat not at all like a fine, highborn lady, for the third bowl was full of a strong, colorless liquor favored by soldiers, sailors and, apparently, foreign architects. 

To his credit, the architect of her embarrassment looked not at all smug once her eyesight had cleared and she had shooed her fluttering ladies away. He did point out with the calm certainty of a man who knows he has won that water and that liquor looked the same, but only a blessed fool could say they also tasted the same. He did smirk just a little when he reminded the queen that his request was for _her_ to kiss _him_ , rather than fobbing him off on her ladies or having him snatch away a kiss from her like a magpie. 

So she did. 

King Hyle’s wife kissed the foreign architect on the mouth, just the once, in full view of her ladies and guards. 

By the time King Hyle’s army reached the city laden with plundered gold and jewels and cages full of captive knights, the temple was complete, glowing blue like a statue carved of the purest ice, its arches curving graceful under the sky. In every tavern, minstrels sang bawdy songs about the king’s wife and the foreign architect, and mummers performed plays about the adulterous couple on every city square. King Hyle had been ready and, even, eager to kiss and touch his wife after so long an absence, but he beat her instead with a knotted belt until she told him, in a tone more defiant than contrite, that she had indeed kissed the architect. She would confess to nothing more, though she’d been seen by all the court in the act of betrayal. The king left her bloodied on the floor of her chamber and sent a troop of his guards to the temple. 

The architect stood on top of the last arch he had completed, for which he had struck his bargain with the queen, admiring the way the sun played on the exquisite blue tiles, and so he saw the guards coming from a long way off and had plenty of time to make his escape. 

The practical said he left the city disguised as a common fisherman or sellsword. 

The glum claimed he had not been standing on top of the arch at all, but was caught sleeping, drunk, in some tavern, and was hacked to pieces, his bones strewn across the courtyard of the temple he’d built, ground into the white dust of the city. 

The knowledgeable nodded sagely when they claimed it well-known the reason he had lingered in the city until the queen’s husband returned was his desperate love for the queen, a mad hope that she would leave the court and her marriage vows and run away with him, a one-handed foreigner. 

The hopeful whispered that when the architect saw the king’s guards run up the stairs to his arch with their swords drawn to kill him, he sprouted feathers from both arms, the maimed and the whole alike. He grew wings, you see, and flew away to safety across the sea. 

One thing is certain: the queen did leave the court and her husband. When the guards came back, bearing either the architect’s bloody head or the news of his escape, the king rushed to the queen’s chamber but found her gone along with the jewels she’d brought as her marriage portion many years earlier. 

She took her own name again, wore her hair short and clothes entirely unbecoming to a lady, though practical enough. She used her jewels to purchase a small smithy. If anyone recognized her, they never dared claim out loud the large smith woman of few words and rare smiles could ever have had anything in common with King Hyle’s long-lost queen. Not unless they were well into their cups, that is, but a person might say and believe anything when drunk, and only fools listened. 

She made excellent swords and armor, passed by the blue temple in the city center which became King Hyle’s tomb but rarely, and kept her own counsel. She had learned about ownership under her husband’s thumb, control in the whispering halls of the palace, power when faced with three seemingly identical bowls she knew contained a trick to test her mettle. She had once kissed a man because she could choose to do so or not, or because he had asked her, or maybe because she was a woman of honor and he had won their contest of wills fair and square.


End file.
